I didn’t want to argue, I didn’t have the strength to argue, so I got up and left them sitting there.

Poor people, it’s been quite a day for them too. They have a daughter who had an affair with an important married doctor, but that had paled into insignificance compared to murder, suicide and said daughter’s determination to get custody of a crazy child who can’t talk and finger-paints in blood. No wonder they look at me as if I’m someone they don’t know.

So much for New Year’s Day. Not a nightmare, but a reality.

Monday,

January 2nd, 1961

I had the nightmare at five o’clock this morning, choked myself awake to sit bolt upright in my bed groaning for breath, still feeling that rich red lake of blood rising, rising until I stood on tiptoe with my nostrils sinking into it, and Harold screaming with laughter as he watched.

The sun was already on its way, light streamed through my open curtains. I got out of bed, fed Marceline, made a pot of coffee and sat at the table to tell myself over and over that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz is dead. People like her are so alive that it’s incredible when they die—you just feel that it can’t be so, that there’s been a mistake. I don’t know why it happened, I don’t know why she let it happen. Because she did let it happen! She saw it in the Glass that last time, and made no attempt to avert it. Yet she was so happy at her party. Maybe she had felt the thing in her brain stirring, and preferred the quickness of Harold’s knife.

But I couldn’t feel grief, I couldn’t weep or mourn. There were too many things to do. Where was Flo? What kind of night had she passed? The first night of her life outside The House.

Job number one was to phone Queens X-ray and inform whoever was in charge of the duty roster at this hour that I wouldn’t be in to work. I gave no reason, simply apologised and hung up while the phone was still squawking. No need to do the same for Pappy, she had finished at Royal Queens on Christmas Eve. Stockton loomed.

I got dressed and went to see if Pappy was awake, opened her door to see her fast asleep, closed it, went upstairs. Not to the front room, that I couldn’t face yet. Instead I explored the other rooms Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz had kept for her own use, three in all. A dreary bedroom for herself, its walls almost as smothered in books as Pappy’s domain. But what books! Had she really made Harold privy to this secret, or did he not comprehend?

“Now I know how you did it, you old horror,” I said, smiling. Scrapbooks stuffed with newspaper clippings about politicians and businessmen and their lives, their scandals, their tragedies, their foibles, the oldest going back thirty years. Who’s Who of all the English-speaking nations. Almanacs. Court proceedings. Hansard records of the Federal and State Parliaments. Anything she thought might come in handy from Australian biographies to lists of societies, associations, institutions. A goldmine for a soothsayer.

Off her bedroom was a cranny for Flo, furnished with an old iron cot stripped to the bare mattress and a chest of drawers—not one picture of a puppy or a kitten or a fairy, not a sign that it had ever been occupied except for the scribbles all over its walls. It looked more like a dead child’s nook in an institution than a living child’s room, and I shivered in dread. Why had she stripped Flo’s cot if she didn’t know that Flo would be gone? Was it a message that, deprived of her life in The House, Flo would die?

Her kitchen was a poky alcove incapable of producing good food, its equipment ancient, battered, dented, cracked, chipped.

What had made her so indifferent to her own comfort? What sort of woman doesn’t care about her nest?

I left to go back downstairs feeling that the mystery grew thicker, that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s death was only the start of an ever-branching maze.

Pappy was moving about, so I told her to come in for coffee and breakfast. Yes, breakfast. So much to do, and all of it needing strength and health.

Jim and Bob called in on their way to work, said they’d stay home if I needed them, but I sent them off. When Toby arrived I was going to do the same, but he wasn’t having any of that, he marched in and stood ready to do battle.

“You’re going to need me today,” he said stiffly, his face very pale, his chin up, his eyes clear and luminous.

In answer, I got up to hug him. He hugged me back, hard.

“Sorry about yesterday, but someone had to do it,” he said.

“Yes, I know that. Sit down, we’ve got a lot to work out.”

“Like getting her body for burial, looking for a will, finding out where they’re holding Flo, to start with,” he said.

But in the end the three of us did the worst job first. We went upstairs and cleaned the front room.

Toby handled the police, and found out that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s body wouldn’t be released for burial until after the Coroner made his finding—anything from one to three weeks. Then he went up the street to hunt for Martin, Lady Richard or anyone who might know about things like undertakers, funeral procedures—how ignorant we are of such matters unless we have experienced them, and none of us had, really. Toby’s father died in the bush. Mr. Schwartz had died while she was in Singapore, Pappy said, and my own family hadn’t lost a member since before I was born.

I phoned the Child Welfare, who, when I couldn’t assure them that I was either next-of-kin or even a remote relative, refused to give me any information about Flo except that she was being well cared for at some unspecified place.

“Not Yasmar!” said Pappy when I hung up.

I sat down limply. “Dear God, I never thought of Yasmar!”

“Flo is five now, Harriet, she could be sent to Yasmar.”

It was the institution where homeless or problem girls were sent until their futures were sorted out. Currently it was the object of bitter criticism because no effort was made to separate the hapless victims of circumstance like Flo from the hardened, extremely wild and sometimes violent girls taken into custody for everything from prostitution to murder.

So I rang Joe the Q.C. in her chambers and started off by asking about wills, about what would happen if there was no will.

“If there’s no will in the house and no solicitor’s name, then the Public Trustee will step in. They’ll advertise in the law journals for anyone holding a will, and look after the estate in the meantime. Search for deeds as well as a will, Harriet, and I’ll see what I can do,” Joe said in that crisp, clear voice I imagined would set the rafters of a courthouse ringing.

“Don’t go yet,” I rushed on. “You can also find me the name of a firm which specialises in child custody cases. If my bones are right, we’re not going to find a will, and nor is the Public Trustee. So I’ll be seeking custody of Flo.”

She didn’t answer for a long moment, then she sighed. “Are you positive that’s what you want to do?” she asked.

“Absolutely positive,” I said.

So she promised to find me a name, and hung up.

Then we commenced to search for a will. Klaus came in from somewhere and helped us open and shake out every book, turn over every page in the scrapbooks, feel the clippings to make sure there was no folded paper underneath. Nothing, nothing, nothing. We did find what appeared to be the deeds to 17 Victoria Street, which was very puzzling. Not 17c, just 17.

“Does that mean she owns all five houses?” Pappy squeaked.

“Surely not,” said Klaus, staring about. “She is not rich.”

There was a big wooden box under the stairs right behind the drum of eucalyptus soap we’d used to scrub the front room, but we hadn’t taken any notice of it, assumed it was a tool box. Then desperation prompted Toby to go back to the cupboard and lift it out. He put it on the tiny work bench in Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s kitchen, and opened it as if anything from Dracula to a concertinaed paper clown might jump out.